This semester I’ve been putting away little bits of time to look for a summer internship. I interviewed with a few companies, and went to the school career fair to try and find an intern position for the coming summer. I was hoping to find a company I wouldn’t mind working for after graduation, work for them over the summer and transition into a full time position after I graduated. Honeywell was at the career fair, but since they don’t currently hire interns, I simply dropped off my resume and carried on. A few days later, I get an email from an engineer at Honeywell who got a recommendation from my senior project professor. He wants me to interview for the full time hardware design engineer position.

A week later, I nervously go to an interview that lasts from 8am-1pm. A lot of material was covered in the interview, and I actually had fun answering a lot of the questions. A lot of questions were on op-amps, which is right up my alley. I’ve spent the last few months brushing up on all things op-amp, pretty much going through my old circuit design book and doing every problem I could find (this is what I do when I can’t get to sleep at night). Also, since we senior project was basically a series of op-amp filters and amplifiers, I have a lot of permanently-burned-into-my-brain op-amp information and experience.

One question they gave me was an inverting amplifier with a resistor in on the positive terminal.

They asked me to find the gain of the amplfiier and explain the purpose of the non-gain-affecting resistor.Funny-enough, I had gone to one of my professors with the exact_same_question about two months ago. I ran across this in a book, and didn’t understand the purpose of the resistor. Needless to say, I knew why it was there, and even why it was the parallel combination of the other two resistors.

So a week later, I get a call offering me the job.They are going to work around the fact that I still have two classes to finish before I graduate(I’m going to take night classes over the summer), and I start work as a hardware design engineer June 4th.